The Astrologer's Daughter (17 page)

‘Is this
her
?’ There is laughter in the shorter man’s voice, and my skin seems to
shrink back as I recognise it instantly.
Rosso
. When Hugh still doesn’t say anything,
Rosso says snidely, ‘
She’s
“the last in a long line of soothsayers with whom Death
walks”? You have to be kidding me. You think
she
has the power to settle our longstanding
bet, once and for all?’

I have no idea what Rosso’s talking about. But the way he’s looking at me actually
makes me want to cover my body in a
burqa
, or hide.

‘If it’s a question of payment,’ Rosso drawls, his eyes never leaving me, running
up and down me like spiders, ‘we’ve got plenty of
money
, right Hughey?’

Both men have the grace to back up when I mount the stairs towards them. Hugh actually
seems apologetic as he holds out a clear plastic slip cover full of papers. I look
down at it in his hand, but I don’t take it.

‘We talked to Jacqueline…’ he says, running his free hand through the fringe of hair
hanging over his face.

‘My sainted mother,’ Rosso interjects sardonically.

‘And she gave us a little background on
your
mum and your family and how—’

‘She’s devastated, by the way,’ Rosso interrupts again, ‘my mother. Took to her bed
this afternoon when she heard the news. She raved about your mother,
raved
.’

I gaze at him, bewildered, the pain rising up and rising up, until Hugh catches the
look on my face and says roughly, ‘Shut
up
, Rosso, let me
speak
.’

‘What I want to know,’ Hugh continues in a wild rush, shaking the plastic slip cover,
‘is whether one of these men is a killer. I mean, could you tell if one of them might
actually have killed someone?’ He corrects himself sharply, ‘
Murdered
someone.’
Rosso shoots him a hard look.

I glance at the packet of papers Hugh is holding, still not understanding a word
that’s coming out of his mouth. ‘What…bet?’ I say weakly.

He pushes the documents at me and I finally take them. The top page has two sets
of birthdates, birthtimes and birthplaces scrawled across the top of it in Hugh’s
bold hand in black permanent marker. No names.

Hugh shoves that lock of hair back again off his face. It’s weird, but he seems almost
nervous.

‘You want me,’ I finally reply, ‘to do a horary reading for each of these…men?’

Hugh nods while Rosso just watches me with his silver eyes, mouth quirked up hatefully
at the corners.

Okay, so the two subjects are men.

Even though I don’t intend to actually follow through on Hugh’s request, part of
me is trying to understand the question I’m receiving right here, right now. I look
down at my watch automatically, making note of the time: 8.03pm.

‘You want me to tell you if one or both of these men deliberately…murdered someone?’

Hugh nods. I do the mental arithmetic on the birthdates and come up with both men
being in their early sixties. There’s a roughly two-year age gap between them; that’s
all I can glean.

‘Just look at everything that’s there and then call me?’ Hugh says, almost pleadingly.
‘My number’s in there. As Rosso said’—he gives Rosso a hard hip and shoulder from
the side—‘we can pay; that’s not a problem. It’s just that what you said the other
day, about my father, got me thinking about—’

Rosso goes, ‘No names, Hughey,
shit
,’ and Hugh actually grabs him by his shirt and
half lifts him off his feet, pushing Rosso into motion so that he stumbles forward
towards the stairs.

‘Call me?’ Hugh says. ‘Once you’ve read everything. I hope you’ll do it. It’s, it’s…’
He closes his glorious eyes briefly. ‘It’s stuffed up my entire life, not knowing.’

Still confused, I watch the two guys manhandle each other down and around the corner
and out of sight before lowering my Maglite. I must have looked like a crazy person,
standing there with my jammed-down beanie and unbound, witchy hair, lit torch in
my raised hand, like a stake. I can still hear their feet on the stairs below when
something suddenly occurs to me.

‘Who?’ I scream down the stairwell. ‘
Who
are these men supposed to have killed?’

‘That’s classified,’ Rosso shouts up, straight away. ‘You don’t need to know that.’

‘But it’s not
enough
,’ I say furiously. ‘I need something more: a date, a place.
Was it a woman? A man?’

There’s a scuffle of sound from below, murmured voices, low and angry.

‘Do you want to know or
not
?’ I hear Hugh snarl.

‘If he finds out you’ve been airing very private dirty laundry with a cheap
palm
reader
, he will kill you
himself
,’ Rosso snaps back. ‘And I will stand back and let
him. I can’t believe you’re actually going through with this.’

More scuffling, then: ‘The 9th of July, 1984,’ Hugh shouts, as the street door opens
and slams.

I go weak, momentarily unable to fit my key into the lock. My hand is shaking too
hard because I know that date.

I
know
that date.

PART 3

Don’t allow the past to poison the present. Fight it.

18

Now that I am home, and in my pyjamas, the tears won’t come.

The rock I am hauling seems heavier than ever, but I lift it effortlessly as I unplug
my home phone before taking cans of creamed corn and stock out of the kitchen cupboards,
dumping their contents into a saucepan. Then I microwave a hunk of frozen chicken
until it’s hot on the outside, but still frozen in the middle, chopping it up haphazardly
and throwing it in until I have something resembling soup going. I season the whole
mess and stir an egg through it so that the white flares out into streamers resembling
drowned blossoms, before turning the flame down and washing up. The whole time I
tell myself I
must be a bad daughter because I do not cry.

The tears still do not come as I lay out blankets and pillows on the couch avoiding
the squat, blank shape of the TV in the corner. The worst has already happened; there’s
no need for the relevant footage, or an accompanying voice over; blow-by-blow coverage:

SES volunteers found her bloodied shirt, hanging in the lower branches of a tree–
Disturbed undergrowth–
Strange circular impressions in the topsoil–
Police sources say the blood trail went
for almost six hundred metres up the mountainside before abruptly ceasing.

While I’m cleaning my teeth and trying to brush out the worst knots in my hair, my
mobile goes off on the vanity unit beside me. It’s Simon, with a two-word text that
says only:
I’m outside
.

Ignoring the reams of missed calls and messages—Wurbik and Vicki amongst them—I let
Simon in. Neither of us speaks. We are both bad children, for our eyes are dry. I
know that nothing could ever surprise us again. We will be impervious.

He sways a little on the spot and I put my arm around his waist gingerly—conscious
of all his wounds, both visible and invisible—and lead him to the made-up couch in
the living room. He lets me hold him lightly for
a second, then his plastic bags
slide out of his fingers and he lays down with his back to me, fully clothed. I douse
all the lights except for the lamp that turns everything in its vicinity a soft orange.
Even from the darkened kitchen I can see his outline, shaking. There’s the soup,
of course, but nobody wants it. So I turn off the gas and put the covered pot in
the fridge.

As quietly as I can, I slide Hugh’s packet of papers off the kitchen bench and take
it and my phone into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I’m not doing these
readings for Hugh, I tell myself fiercely, who is nothing, and can never be anything
to me. I am doing it for the person who was
murdered
—it wasn’t an accident, Hugh
made that clear enough—on 9 July more than a decade before I was born.

Already the problem has arisen of what I should do if the answer, in the case of
either man, is:
Yes
. But I park that for later because I’m good at compartmentalising.
Grief has taught me that: how to batten down the hatches; seal off the affected areas.

Setting aside the two sets of handwritten details, I fan the rest of the papers out
across my nubbly bedspread. There’s a URL crawling along the bottom of each page
from an obscure astrology website I’ve never heard of; research from the internet
that Hugh thought was important for me to read, as background.

What had Mum said once?
They show you the darndest things, Avi
.

And they do. I’ve had more windows into my mother’s life than I could ever wish for,
and yet she remains mysterious, out-of-reach, unknowable. When I think of her now,
she comes bathed in that soft, red-gold light of my dream, as remote as the stars.

There are computer-generated astrological charts interspersed amongst the pages
Hugh provided, the symbols coloured in baby pinks and blues and greens. Curious,
I backtrack until I find the last relevant subheading, helpfully outlined in green
highlighter:

C
ASE
S
TUDY
3
The Descendants of Beverley Eunice Crowe,
Astrologer (Australia)

Every hair on my body standing on end, I read:

Beverley Eunice Crowe was the first in a recorded matrilineal line of soothsayers
with whom Death was reputed to ‘walk’. She was said to have told one querent that
Death had blue eyes and a calm and cultured demeanour, who ‘is a great personal comfort’.
When her body was discovered in bizarre circumstances in a client’s apartment in
Manly, New South Wales, Australia, in 1962, there were allegations of occult practices
that were never
substantiated and no culprit was ever charged. But when her only
daughter, Joyce, hung up her own shingle, many practitioners in this branch of horoscopic
astrology—

My eyes fly down the page and two passages leap out at me as if outlined in flames:

Joyce was known to have credited seeing Death at several critical junctures in her
life. Like her mother, Joyce also died before she reached the age of forty-five and
it is well known that she foretold the exact date and circumstances of her premature
and tragic death based on the Pleiades rising in opposition to her ascendant in conjunction
with the sun in baleful opposition to Mars.

Joanne is said to have surpassed both her mother and her grandmother in intuitive
ability, but her life has been marred by more than its fair share of grief and tragedy
due to a prolonged period of that well-known condition ‘Saturn hunting the moon’.
It is also well known in the horary community that Joanne found, then swiftly lost,
her soul mate—a man whose natal Venus, it may be added, was conjunct that most fated
of indicators, her natal vertex. After his death, she is said to have been ‘destroyed’,
but as Pluto is her planetary ruler, together with the calming influence of Neptune—marrying
transformation and arcane power with wisdom, sensitivity, vision,
empathy and compassion—Joanne
did recover and continues to do great work in the field of—

There’s one natal chart for Bev, one for Joyce.

One for Mum and one for…me.

Refusing to look at the charts—
our charts!
—I fire up my laptop and type in the URL
for one of the pages I’m holding and it’s really there, all out there, for people
to see. We Crowes are a case history accessible to every wacko spiritualist nut-job
on the planet with WiFi. There aren’t any direct hyperlinks to our names, thank God,
so we’re unlikely to ever trend on Google, but some astrology tragic in Chicago,
Illinois, has compiled a Ridley’s on the best-known horary practitioners in recent
history, and as I scroll through paragraph after paragraph of lunacy, I see that
I get a mention, too:

It remains to be seen whether Joanne’s daughter Avicenna (named auspiciously after
the great Persian polymath) manifests any—

Mum wouldn’t even tell me her birthdate, but her chart,
her chart
, is right here.
On the screen and in my hand. Wurbik would have seen this already, and Mal; anyone
else who’d cared to look. Suddenly, all the weird little questions, the glances between
the two men that day at the police complex, they all make sense.

I shut my laptop down and push everything aside
for later, only keeping the piece
of paper with Hugh’s handwriting on it in front of me. I tell myself that after today,
I will never do this again. Because no one in Chicago, Illinois, or anywhere else
in the world, has the right to know whether I manifest a common cold, let alone ‘the
knowledge’. After these two readings are done, I will never again frame a question
for the heavens to answer.

Some things may have no answer, see. I accept that. But some questions should never
be
asked
. Boon was right: this thing we Crowes can do is dangerous.

I hesitate for a while over whether to assign the quesited thing—the issue of another’s
murder—to the seventh house governing
other people
and
open enemies
, or to the fifth
house governing
sex
and
pleasure
.

Something—the murder date, or maybe the weird
frisson
of discord between Hugh and
Rosso, or just the way Hugh had looked: kind of wild and sick and desperate—makes
me plump for the fifth house. The house and its ruler will largely determine the
quesited thing, the answer, and I hope this
gut feeling
is right.

It takes me a few hours to progress the men’s natal charts to the night in question.
After I finish annotating the transits into the outer wheel for each man, it becomes
clear that the two are implicated in some personal grief or misfortune for the same
day and time period. The older one was physically injured—that much is obvious from
the afflictions to Mars and Uranus and his progressed sun, with trouble coming through
siblings, or family connections. But the younger man…

I lay my pen down and rock for a long time, my knees drawn up under my chin, hoping
that none of what I’m looking at is true. At birth, the younger man’s natal stars
show multiple afflictions affecting his natal sun and moon. There are harsh aspects
between Mars and the sun conjunct Venus, between Mars and the ascendant, between
the moon and Jupiter, between both the luminaries and Mars. The ‘potential’ outlined
in the man’s radix is for abuse coming through the male parent, with deep hostility
or neglect on the female side. Couple those stars with multiple afflictions to natal
Mercury—governing the mind—and what you have is the ‘potential’ for a walking time
bomb: an individual who is at once argumentative, secretive, destructive, deceitful
and hypersensitive, but also exceptionally well spoken, intelligent, ambitious and
decisive. Cunning, but resourceful. A survivor.

Okay.

Now progress the natal conditions forward to the evening of 9 July, 1984, throw several
unusual conjunctions between Pluto and other fateful nodes into the mix—stimulated
by transits of malefic Mars and Saturn—and this much is obvious: the younger man
had some kind of meltdown that night, reaching a dangerous turning
point. Violence
and force were involved. While the man’s own death is not indicated in his eighth
house stars, death
is
indicated in that house via afflictions to Venus and the moon
from a number of sources—Jupiter, for one, and the transiting lunar nodes. The man
lost someone he considered a loved one (female); and the indications are that the
loved one’s destruction came by his own hand in a singular instance resembling madness.

I pick up my mobile and gradually the rocking slows, then ceases. It is 4.44am. In
five, maybe six hours I will have to give my final oral English presentation of the
year; no, scratch that—of my entire
life
. It will be a shambles, because nothing
short of a blow to the head will let me get some rest now. It’s like I have electricity
running through my veins. I’ll be lucky if I can string three words together. And
I won’t have any help, because Simon Thorn has earned the right not to speak; the
right not to be pushed into doing anything, by anyone, ever again. If he wants to
sleep with his boots on in my living room for the rest of his life, so be it.

There’s a mobile number in Hugh de Crespigny’s showoffy arsehole handwriting, on
the last page of the printouts. Uncaring of the time, I type into my phone:

The progressed chart for the older man indicates he was badly hurt by a male sibling
or family member (brother?) on the date in question.

The one for the younger man indicates mental breakdown and force/violence used against
loved one (female) resulting in loved one’s death. I DO NOT want your money.

With a sharp pang, I add:
Please do not come here again.

If I was older and more sophisticated, with a different face, and a whole different
personality—arch, witty, fascinating—then maybe a guy like Hugh would come into my
life and not ever want to leave it.

Yeah
, I tell myself,
dreaming.

After I send the message it’s like this weight comes off me. But then I remember
the issue
, the one I shoved in the ‘for later’ compartment. If everything is connected,
and people really do wander into your life for a reason, all those things I never
believed in before but maybe almost kind of do now: then I need to breach the compartments,
let the waters in. Let them mix and mingle. I owe it to Fleur to do it. And to Mum;
because she would try and set things right, it was her way.

I pull up the mobile number for Don Sturt and just stare at it for a while. He might
be on a stakeout and get my message in real-time—in which case he will most likely
call me up and subject me to all kinds of awkward questions that I can’t answer.
But it’s more likely he’ll be asleep and this will be the last of it; for me, anyway.

Either way, once the message is delivered, it’s no longer
my responsibility. If Boon
is to be believed, it never was. It was already written, and all people like me amount
to is Fate’s dumb conduit.

I copy the two sets of birthdates, birthtimes and birthplaces provided by Hugh de
Crespigny into the message for Don and tell him:

Progressed stars and transits indicate the older man was injured by male sibling
or family member (brother?) and that younger man killed a female ‘loved one’ with
force or violence on the night of 9 July, 1984. I was not given names. The source
does not know I am sending this. Do not ask me how I got this. Please do not involve
me any further. Avicenna Crowe.

The message in no way breaches anyone’s confidentiality, I reason feverishly. No
names are involved. It could just be a stupid hunch, an awful coincidence, in which
case Don can shrug his narrow, ropy shoulders, hit
delete
and get on with his life
knowing he tried his hardest.

Filled with misgivings I hit
send
.

I look down at Mum’s birth chart with unseeing eyes so that all the baby pinks and
blues and greens go blurry and run together. Now that I have it I could make it
speak
.
I could find out her state of mind on that Wednesday. I could find out from where
the harm—if any—had come. Had a friend set off this chain of events? A co-worker?
A…lover?
All her secrets—and now I know, she had them, she had them in spades—I could find
them all out and fill in all the shadowy spaces in my mother I never knew existed.